Traditional approaches to improving preventive care have had limited
success. We used interviews, focus groups, and surveys to examine how self-determination theory (SDT) may
illuminate influences on clinicians' decisions to take time for
preventive counseling.
The concepts of autonomy, competence, and relatedness were used to organize the
psychological factors that clinicians reported as most influential in their
decision-making on when to counsel for obesity. They felt a high degree of
autonomy, but experienced barriers to competence and low levels of
relatedness with colleagues.
Our members' insights are published in an article in the July/August 2008 issue of
Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine (JABFM) ,
titled "" (PDF download)
“
Obesity in children and adolescents is probably our most common problem and. . . it’s one of the hardest to get a handle on how to effectively deal with it. I can’t write them an antibiotic or cough medicine, it’s not something that I can just write a script for. It’s a societal problem, it’s a familial problem and it’s just been hard to try to determine the most effective way to deal with it and I’m still grappling with that.”
